Finding The Best Healthy Restaurants In Chicago

By SRK Editor

| Last updated November 29, 2018

Finding a healthy restaurant option can be a daunting prospect, especially in cities or neighborhoods you’re not familiar with. In fact, finding a healthy restaurant in this day and age can often seem like the pursuit of an oxymoron.

The truth is that fast food joints are everywhere and filled with greasy burgers, fried sides and sodas. Sit-down restaurants, on the other hand, often go heavy on the butter or other high-calorie ingredients.

So, how do you negotiate the modern-day restaurant terrain on the search of healthy restaurants? If you’re on a quest towards weight loss or general health, searching for a healthy restaurant is just as much about ignoring and discarding the bad as finding the good, even if the good is a needle in a haystack.

But, luckily you do have a friend when it comes to finding new restaurant options and that friend is the internet and, more precisely, your smartphone. Thanks to smartphone technology you can search for what you need based on exact queries, enabling you to narrow down options towards your preferences.

So how do we make sure that your phone is steering us in a healthy direction? Here is how you can find healthy restaurants through that mobile information portal known as your cell phone.

Find the Right Apps

If you want something done on your phone, there’s probably an exact and right app for that. So, finding the right app is important and it is the case when it comes to finding healthy restaurant options using your cell phone.

A number of mobile apps have emerged that steer consumers to those restaurants and help highlight the healthy items on their menus.

www.HealthyOut.com: The website HealthyOut provides consumers with an intuitive tool that allows them to match healthy restaurant dishes to their specified health preferences, from low-carb to gluten-free.

www.GoPure.com: On the other side of the country, San Francisco startup GoPure is a directory service that works like a green-conscious version of Yelp. Diners simply type in the kind of food they want and a location, and GoPure provides options listed by price, proximity, and purity. Searches can be filtered with eating preferences like no GMO ingredients or locavore.

www.HealthyDiningFinder.com: In partnership with the National Restaurant Association, Healthy Dining recently created the Healthy Dining Finder app, providing an easily accessible guide to more than 4,000 menu items at more than 350 restaurant brands and 60,000 locations, sorted by zip code. The Healthy Dining program also includes the Kids LiveWell program, which highlights healthier items on children’s menus.

www.shft.com/FoodTripping: A collaboration from lifestyle platform SHFT.com and Ford Motor Company produced Food Tripping, which helps users find healthier, tasty alternatives to fast food virtually anywhere in the U.S. There are plenty of healthy choices cited among the growing database of eateries, healthy food markets, farmers’ markets, juice joints, artisans, microbreweries, and organic coffee spots.

Paleo Digest: Helps you find Paleo foods near you and post dishes that you have tried. The app is also Apple Watch friendly.

Veg Travel Guide: a handy app for vegetarians, vegans, and anyone following veggie diets. Lets you find healthy restaurants and share them with others.

Needless to say these are just some of the many healthy food apps available on the market. As anyone who’s trying to have a low-calorie meal outside their own home knows, they’re difficult to find. But if you use the available nutrition guides at some of your favorite restaurants, you should be able to actually discover some nice, light meals that you weren’t previously aware of.

After all, much of the restaurant experience is the ability to customize your own meal. You can go to a Chinese buffet and have 1,000 calories or have 300 – or you can have 700 nutritional calories. It’s all up to you. And, of course, it doesn’t hurt to have an iPhone telling you all about what you’re eating as well.

We understand that finding healthy meals, especially in a hurry, can be problematic. It is with this in mind that the concept of Square Roots Kitchen was born, looking to fill the need for healthy, tasty and quickly-served food options in the Chicago area.

You can order your next Square Roots Kitchen meal for dine-in, pick up or delivery via our website at www.squarerootskitchen.com or via our app, available for both Android and iOS.

If you’re looking for your next catered meal, SRK can also provide healthy catering options throughout the Chicago area. For more information visit our catering page: https://squarerootskitchen.com/catering